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Politico, Random House will team up on instant e-books – CSMonitor.com.

Will a series of presidential campaign e-books be a relevant link in the chain of digital news superfluity? Remember how long the race to POTUS 2008 lasted?

The idea of 2012 presidential candidate e-books seems like overkill with journalists embedded in the Twittersphere, presidential candidates armed with social media teams able to construct tablet and smartphone campaign apps as well as news agencies uploading reports in real-time.

With this alliance, the expectation of profit is a likely goals but what are the perceived benefits to voters? Will an e-book remedy voter apathy of the e-reader equipped electorate?

Will reading a real-time e-book account about the 2012 race function like a passenger side mirror, making the competition seem closer than it appears?

We’ll just have to wait and see. I’m sure there will be an app for it. I prefer to load my Nook with books that nourish my thirst for fiction so I think I’ll just keep my laptop battery charged so I can read e-news about the big race.

The publicist for Touch Press sent Clarke an email promoting the app and a link to the download. However Clarke doesn’t own an iPad. So he asks Touch Press to send him an iPad for free.

He reasons, “I did not want to buy the whole; I wanted to be given the whole for free. This was my right, as someone who was given things for free to report on them so that other people would buy them.”

Clarke admits that he also does not have any friends who own iPads, so he cannot borrow one to employ the app.Therefore he felt he could not really appreciate how the app works and write a review in good faith.

I know that book reviewers are given books and reading related products gratis so they can review them. However, Clarke expects readers to believe that he doesn’t know anyone, ANYONE with an iPad at the The Boston Globe or at Bowdoin College, where he is a teacher?

Seriously? Is he unlikable, lazy or cheap? Or all three? I don’t know. As I read his column, the words arrogance and entitlement popped into my swelling thought bubble which was rapidly teetering toward a rupture.

Apparently it did not occur to Clarke to visit an Apple retail store to test the product. Nooooo! Do you think he is the kind of guy that prefers delivery over take-out?

Anyway, I began to wonder about the relevancy of book reviewers and other news correspondents who are electronic device or social media luddites?

E-books, reading apps and electronic devices are like soldiers of an army in a literary global occupation. How can any newspaper or television correspondent charged with reporting on books remain relevant without availing oneself to the instruments that are altering the reading experience?

Book reviewers must begin to alter some of the content of their literary critiques. They must adapt and begin to report not just on book plots, but also on the evolutions of the reading experience of audiences enhancing their reading experience through technology.

Every reader will not own or use an electronic device to read but many will. Consequently book reviewers should take the steps necessary to intersperse book reviews, reading reviews with information that reflect the various vehicles employed for the reading experience.

Perhaps Clarke’s report is tongue-in-cheek but perhaps it isn’t.

However, brick and mortar booksellers, publishers, libraries and others are seeking new ways and features that will help maintain relevancy and sustain viability.

Why shouldn’t book reviewers do the same?

Clarke and other reviewers who share his view about the perks of book reviewers need to re-evaluate their roles and responsibilities to their audiences. Shouldn’t reviewers be inclined to write more comprehensive reports which reflect the various consumers of reading. Shouldn’t reviewers be responsible for examining the vehicles that facilitate reading?

I think the best reviewer is the one who doesn’t lose the willingness or the want to further his capacity and doesn’t expect anyone other than himself to be the catalyst to augment his position.

It’s a new game. I don’t recommend that Clarke steal and iPad, but if begging and borrowing proved unsuccessful for him then perhaps he ought to expense one or at least drive to the nearest Apple retailer and check out the latest technology for himself.

In all the myriad ways that one might express grief, I had never considered for a moment that some might want to read their way out of it.  It seems, to me, an odd sort of thing to do, except when I consider the idea of mortality, wrapped around death.  When I think of the things that I have in mind as wanting to do before I die, I realize that a death of a loved one might be enough to spur me on.

Which is the case for Nina Sankovitch, author of the readallday.org blog and of the new book Tolstoy and the Purple Chair.  I had a chance to review Sankovitch’s book recently as The New York Journal of Books—take a look if you’ve a mind to.

When her sister dies, Sankovitch takes herself up on an scheme that she has wanted to do apparently for some time and decides to allow herself the luxury—and, indeed, what a luxury it seems—to sit herself down in her purple chair and read a book a day for a year.  She also decides that she will, the day after reading the book, review it on her site.

This is where, for me, the ick factor sets in.

I can completely support (although no one, to be fair, asked me to) the idea of reading a book a day for a year.  Or, more precisely, as we shall see, I can support the idea of reading for a nice long chunk of time each day for a year—the book-a-day factor seems artificial to me for reasons that I will present below.  And I completely support anything that one must do, including chocolate, quitting one’s job and getting one or more dogs, in order to deal with deep grief.  But the whole of this thing seems frankly odd to me.

First, let me note that Nina Sankovitch lives just down the road from me in Westport, CT.  Having lived in Westport, I can fully attest that it is one reading town.  You can get away book-free in Fairfield or Norwalk, but you’d better have a good book anecdote to tell or you will be thrown out of many a dinner party or deli in Westport.  (Happily, Litchefield County, where I recently moved, has proved itself to be a fairly reading place as well, and one that appreciated the finer things, just like Westport, our Mother Ship.)

Back to the topic.  I must say that, in reading The Purple Chair, I was moved by the early chapters that told the story of the sister’s passing and of the relationships  among all the members of Sankovitch’s birth family.  It was not until the reading reading reading started that I began to twitch.

There were the rules, for instance.  The sad part of demanding of oneself that you read a book a day is that it immediately rules out books over a certain number of pages—somewhere between 300 and 400 for most of us, as we determine how much of the actual day we can give to reading.

That rules out a hell of a lot of great books right there.  One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Forget about it.  Catch 22.  No way.  Instead, you get to read Gatsby over and over, but not The Beautiful and the Damned or even Zelda’s book, Caeser’s Things.  Too long. Too weird.

Why, I asked myself upon reading this rule, would anyone want to create a situation in which short books were deemed “possible” if not “superior” to longer books?  Me, I like my books long—Garp, Great Expecations, the Foundation trilogy, Dune, on and on—and so I cannot understand why someone who so loves books (and Sankovitch moistens the pages of her own books slobbering over other people’s books) would want to narrow down and eliminate some of the great books from great authors (poor Henry James) just because of length and because the whole of the experiment is set up like a sea cruise in which the time as come to bid Naples goodbye after our allotted five hours and so back to the boat and on to the next port.

Plus you end up reading waaayyyy too much Hemingway.

Not for me.  Really.  Not for me.  Let me linger in Naples and read at my own pace (even with a reviewer’s deadlines).

This other part that gets me is the “I shall review the book the next day” part.  This concerns me for two reasons.  First, it even more gets in the way of the reading.  Why split your attention in having to take an hour or so to blog about the book if what you want it the real, true and pure love of reading in the first place?

And, second, that fact that her blog was in place and she was filling it with all her adventures in reading seems a little too capitalistic to me.  As if she had seen Julie and Julia or read the Julie/Julia Project at Salon.com and wondered what variation on the theme of spending a year doing something might yield her literary results.

Am I being icky and critical here?  Perhaps.  But the fact that Sankovitch’s pathway to hard cover publication pretty much followed the exact same trajectory as Julie Powell’s did makes me squirm a bit in my chair.  From blog to New York Times feature article to book contract to (maybe, just maybe—although filming someone reading and writing reviews could be problematic) a movie.  We’ll see.

Where the book collapses inward like a partially baked soufflé is when Sankovitch, having pretty much told us her whole story, begins to present chapter after chapter extolling various books read and linking them to childhood memories.  The best of these is the Tolstoy memory, which earned its way into the title (and a very good title it is), but that it the end of the book and getting there is no easy read.  A love of books that is based on the number of pages and on the cover, the title or what is at hand, is a rather tepid love at best.

Another recent book about books and those who write them is Nom De Plume by Carmela Ciuraru.

Now this little book lives up to its topic—the why and wherefore of an author choosing to adopt a pen name—with a great deal of verve.  That Ciuraru chose well in selecting the authors to write about—do not for any reason miss the chapter on writer Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and the superb-to-the-point-of-perfect The Talented Mr. Ripley—and writes with such affection about her subjects and with such a revealing and light touch that the reader starts to try and slow down as he realized that the number of pages is waning, only to keep reading full speed in order to learn what happens next.

The account of the authors and their new personae is something like the cable shows that reveal what happens to people who win lotteries.  Some are far better with their pen names than they were ever before (George Orwell).  Some suffer for the sake of their new identities (Romain Gary, in one of the book’s funniest chapters).  And for some the change means little (Sylvia Plath took a pen name to protect her mother who she had written about harshly in her book The Bell Jar—but she died soon after publication and the truth rang out, sparing her mother nothing whatsoever).

Note that I have also reviewed this book at the NYJB.  If you’d like to know more about it, here’s the review.

Now, having had some time pass since I read and reviewed these books, it seems to me that the difference between the two of them is that, in one, the love is ladled on the books—almost to the point of a fetish—and, in the other, the love is for literature and for those who write it.

This may seem an odd thing to say, and yet, having read both books, and having reviewed so many others over the years, it has occurred to me again and again that there is a vast difference between books and literature.  One would think that books are the object that contains the literature.  And to a point that is true.  But books are objects that can contain so many things.  A great deal of crap, for instance.  So the fact that a given bit of work has found its way into covers in no way guarantees literature.

I was once someone who hoarded books.  I worshiped the little paper idols.  No more.  When I moved from a farmhouse in Easton, things changed.  (Repeat after me, slowly and with one of those mysterious European accents that movies favor:  “I had a farm in Easton…”)  In part they changed through downsizing. Moving from a huge old farmhouse to a historic little cottage in the historic area of a historic little Connecticut town require one to give away a hell of a lot of books.

But timing was part of it as well.  We moved just as the Kindle, and, even better, the iPad came into vogue, allowing me to store thousands of books in one super-object.  Miraculous. And the Internet, which is a source from which you can end up mainlining literature if you want to.

So the point is this:  don’t confuse the book (the object) with its contents.  One is a vital, living thing:  an act of creativity and communication, the point of which is to allow one heart and mind to speak to another in a deep act of communion.  The other is a dusty thing and will hurt your back if you move too many.

So next time our dear friend takes to her purple chair, I hope it will be for healing act of reading that happens when two minds collide.  And I hope she experiences great joy in the act.

There has been much ado about J.K. Rowling‘s Pottermore. Well inquiring minds can move on to the their next investigation. Pottermore will be an exclusive retailer for Harry Potter e-books. Old-fashioned real books will not be available for direct purchase through Pottermore. However, the Pottermore website will include links to booksellers retailing paper Harry Potter tomes.

Here is a quote from Pottermore C.E.O. Ron Henwood at a press conference:

“We won’t sell physical books directly, certainly not on the site,but we will be providing links to publishers websites and if they sell the [physical] books there, people can obviously buy them.”

“…if they sell the books, people can obviously buy them.” Obviously.

I am heedful of Rowling’s innovation, technology and business acumen. E-books are hot commodities. The Harry Potter brand has evolved from a modest literary origin into a super multi-sensory commodity.  Pottermore is an organic progression of Rowling’s brainchild.

My boyfriend and I both own e-readers and notebook computers. His 15-year-old niece and her 11-year-old brother are enamored of all things Harry Potter. Each owns a notebook computer, his niece owns a Kindle and their parents own and iPad, iTouch, Blackberry as well as personal laptops. We hope to take the niece and nephew duo to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter™ in Orlando next year.

Although my boyfriend’s uber-electronic family is the ideal target consumer for Pottermore,  it is not the norm for most Harry Potter-loving families.  I also personally know many families with Potter-loving children who do not have their own e-readers, smartphones, tablets or personal computers. Their exposure to e-books is practically non-existent. If it is available, it is limited and primarily obtained through a television ad or store demo.  If they are really lucky, they have access through a school library or public library network.

There is a slight miasma of exclusivity from the Pottermore apparatus.

Rowling rocketed to success on the hardcover back of the Harry Potter series. Millions of kids and adults with eyeballs and a willingness to read have picked up at least one Harry Potter book. I have friends who own every  H.P. book published to date. Most of whom, like myself don’t have children. However, I am also personally acquainted with kids and urban community centers endowed with preloved copies of Harry Potter books and are always seeking more.

The live debut of Pottermore will continue to generate more excitement and enthusiasm, especially for those equipped to take pleasure in its arrival.

The rest may have to settle and use there imagination just like they read about in those old Harry Potter books.

Worstall acknowledges that authors traditionally are not the best salespeople, albeit capable. E-book superstar Amanda Hocking also recognizes the labor-intensive marketing efforts she exerts on her blog.

Hocking writes:

“The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.”

The publishing industry already has “marketing specialists”; they are called literary agents and Amanda Hocking and “Amazon-million-e-book seller” John Locke each have one.

Perhaps the self-publishing boom will catalyze more literary agents to work as independent contractors instead of publishing house hustlers…perhaps.

Writers would rather write than sell.

So the answer to Worstall’s question is, “Re-examine the role and skills of the literary agent in your publishing house.”

I remember Lily Tomlin at one point in the show remarking that, if we did not change and grow from childhood to adulthood, our world would be overrun with firemen, baseball players and ballerinas.  It was a great laugh line, but it has not proven to be true in my life.

You see, my life is over-run with writers.  After having survived a period of time in which everyone I knew was the purveyor of one form of alternative medicine or another—homeopaths mostly, God bless every one of them—I have now, as a result of a move to a very small, almost invisible town only twenty minutes away from where I was living (excepting the giant bubble that kept people from living, this village very much looks and feels like the village in The Prisoner).

Now everyone I know quite suddenly is a writer.  Some are working hard on their memoirs.  Others look for rhymes and call the results poetry.  Most are fiction writers.  If fact, I officially belong to a group of fiction writers, which is the underpinning of all this.

There is great joy in knowing writers, of course, but like the actors, dancers and, yes, writers of my youth in and around New York City, one has to wonder how many of them will publish their way into all our lives, making them “for real” writers, and how many carry a dream—a most honorable dream, to be sure, but a dream from which they will one day awaken, teary-eyed.

This extends waaaayyyyyyy beyond my very small arena of those that I see in the flesh.  To float about on a blog in the internet is to float past, bump into and, sometimes, do everything in one’s power to sink, other writers on other blogs.  In fact, literary blogs have become so common that I can’t help but wish that I could separate myself a bit from the pack.  (Thus the very slight adjustment of the name of this thing, which I would much more prefer that others thought of as a notebook than a “blog.”  Smarmy?  Perhaps.  Uppity?  Likely.  But what can you do?  The heart wants what it wants…)

Much is being said about the changes taking place in the publishing industry these days.  Optimists tell us that it is morphing into a flatter playing field and that, thanks to the internet (and Smashwords) no writer needs to wait to find and agent any longer or to try and wrestle few cents away from a publisher—as Martin Luther said about priests (that every man is his own priest for non-Lutherans), the literary optimists say about publishing:  that the best work will, as always, rise like cream to the top and that those million or so other ho-hum or just-plain-bad manuscripts will, as the name says, be smashed to bits.  Pessimists tell us that the publishing industry, and the economy surrounding it, is melting, melting, like the Wicked Witch of the West, after the economic catastrophe of 2008 threw some cold water on the old girl.  (Pessimists love complicated metaphors the way that Optimists love Martin Luther.)

The point is, it is impossible to define just who is and who is not a writer these days.  Far be it from me to impose any rules, like maybe that you have to have been formally and professionally published to claim the title, or you actually have to have, at some point, made some money at it.  (Demanding an ongoing source of income from writing is just too damned cruel to even consider.)

Which is not to say that there are not some deliciously talented people self-publishing these days.  There are, which is all the more reason for those who don’t know what they are doing to do something else with their free time.  We are, after all, talking about the norm here, not the exception to it–those who write beautifully and who opt to skip the horrors of agents and publishers (who can blame them, when my last book was published and I got my author’s copies, I noticed that my publisher misspelled MY NAME on the spine of my book.  There are days that I want to self-publish, if only to get control of the process…)

But, to return to the topic,  we have writers writing (and why do these questionable writers never get blocked?  It is a mystery, such as Noel Coward considered in his song, “Why Do the Wrong People Travel, While the Right People Stay at Home.”  Again, uppity?  You decide.) writing writing and, if not getting published, then publishing publishing publishing, many in blogs (another reason for the jump to “Cahier.”)  It’s beginning to all be a cacophony, like the Real Housewives of Anywhere, the reunion show, when they all talk at once and Andy’s eyes tear and cross.

Like those Housewives (Except Camile from Beverly Hills–she’s exempt.), there are just too many writers, too, too many, keyboards clacking late into the night, bad breath being breathed on the keys…

But back to Lily Tomlin and the children picking their roles in life—even then, I suspect, there were more writers than teacher ever knew about.  Because writing is not a career, after all, it is something like an obsession.  And because ballerina and baseball player both seem like a more plausible career than writer, even to a second grader…

Remember Christmas in Connecticut?  I remember it not only as a damned good Barbara Stanwyck movie (Great actress, B.S., she could play it all, comedy and drama and romance.  She was just that good.) but also as the movie that depicted what Connecticut would be like when I moved there from Oklahoma.  I was, as they say, deceived.  And yet, even the reality of Norwalk, Connecticut in the summer of 1980 was better than Oklahoma.

The point is that that was the first movie I ever saw—perhaps the first movie ever made—that showed the difference between the reality and the perception of writers.  Stanwyck wrote a Martha Stewart styled article for a “women’s” magazine.  In her monthly screed, she presented her readers with the idea of her as a superwoman, someone who could run a large farm, bake bread and pies everyday, while holding her child in her non-dominant arm and rush to kiss her loving husband when he got home from the architecture firm every night.  In reality, she lived in a terrible, small apartment in New York City, heated her hands over the radiator and knew nothing about cooking or keeping house.  Also, she was a single, working woman, who supported herself by creating the fiction of her life in print.

As such she was doing what everyone’s doing now—creating a digital life for themselves online, in which their art is thriving, their wit is sharp and they are loved loved loved by a throng of bloggy lovers.

The reality?  An ongoing one-sided conversation with the digital void, with perhaps two or three real readers turning up for a new post.  A book from Smashbooks with a cover like a plain-wrapped piece of smut that sold two copies when it came out ten months ago.  And ten ideas for more books, that will surely find an audience.

Add this to the MFA troupes who bought the idea that, if you just get your masters in creative writing (my head swims at the thought of it), then automatically, just by virtue of the piece of paper that you bought, your work will have merit and you will find an agent, a publisher and a movie deal within three weeks.  Oh, my, oh, my, oh, my.  It’s like a literary Ponzi scheme, a way in which mid-list authors can support themselves working in mid-level colleges and a way the colleges can turn the saddest and most obsessed portion of the population into cattle, like those who happily walk through Temple Grandin’s circular pathways to the slaughter house because someone has finally bothered to figure out the way cattle think.  The outcome is the same—death—but the pathway is ever so much more pleasant, so the cattle skip along, humming under their cud.

Enough about that, but you get my point.  Writers writers writers, all writing writing writing.  And about what do they write?

Writing.

Even more than filmmakers need to make films about films and the people who make them, writers need to write about writers who write and the books that they produce.  It is an endless cycle, as proven by two new books, each about books themselves and the writers who produced them in an endless harvesting of words, words, words.  Words gathered up and slapped on a page and then pages pressed into books and books cherish and assessed, as we assess the writers who wrote them and around and around again and again over months that turn to years that turn to decades that turn to centuries of word, words, wordy wordy words.

And to think it all depends upon a purple chair…

I have to back up a moment to say that, part of the reason I am as surrounded as I am by writers is because I work as a book reviewer for The New York Journal of books.  This means that I am surrounded by ghostly writers at all times. And they peak, Casper-headed, over my shoulder as I read, trying to discern my opinion of their work as I read it.  They especially hover during the hours just before a deadline, when I am typing away on my MacBook Pro, quickly enough that the letters have been wiped off the “N,” “E,” “S,” and “D” keys (my left hand must hit harder than my right) as well as the center of the Space Key.

Recently, I happened to get two books for review that were all about writers writing and the readers who love them, which gave rise to this post.

First was Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, by Nina Sankovitch, who is somewhere out there here in Connecticut, which I guess should not necessarily be endearing to me, but somehow is.  Second was Nom De Plume, by Carmela Ciuraru, who, like me, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, which most definitely is endearing, as she, like me, likely has ghostly writer friends all her own.

But with this I see our hour is up and we will have to pick up here in our next session…

Until then, mon ami, keeping writing…

Worse, after this father’s retirement in 1974 and death not long after, Lyons chooses, instead of ending the book (40 years of night life would, I think be ample for most of us), to take over the rest of the book for himself, padding it out with his own interviews with more recent film actors.

That his own interviews show how much less he has to offer than his witty and urbane father did is one thing.  That he doesn’t seem to realize this simple fact is another.

What could have, in the hands of a loving and yet stern editor been a truly wonderful account of a time and place well worth accounting is, instead, something akin to deciding to go on Celebrity Apprentice to see if there’s a bit more life in the old career yet. An act, not unlike self-immolation, of attention seeking of the most pathetic sort.

I have a hell of a lot more to say about the book, including Lyons’ Big Mistake in messing with Noel Coward while I’m around. To see my full review of Stories My Father Told Me:  Notes from the Lyon’s Den at The New York Review of Books, click here.

Why, Jeffrey, Why?

If you haven’t read Isherwood’s journals, please invest the time and money to do so–they are extraordinary works.  In some ways his ruthlessly honest journals are the best things he ever wrote, so give them a shot.  And if you’d like to read my review of the Isherwood book, here it is.

And here is the final reprint from my old blog, to get things started here on the new:

He’s always been one of my favorite authors and I never enjoyed him more than when I jumped into the deep waters of his journals.  In them, I found this short passage, which he calls his “Prayer for Writers.”

“Oh source of my imagination, teach me to extend toward all living beings that fascinated, unsentimental, loving and all-pardoning interest which I feel for the characters I create. May I become identified with all humanity, as I identify myself with these imaginary persons. May my art become my life, and my life my art. Deliver me from snootiness, and from the Pulitzer Prize. Teach me to practice true anonymity. Help me to forgive my agents and my publishers. Make me attentive to my critics and patient with my fans. For yours is the conception and the execution. Amen”

In his entry for that day, he continues on:  ”Stop trying to use the conscious will.  Free the Ego from its attachments with expert gentleness, like a surgeon.  Remember that the strangulated Ego is everything you hate in others–so how can you hate anybody?  You are only hating yourself.  The surgeon doesn’t hate the hernia:  he simply reduces it…  Forgive yourself and then operate.”

One agent I heard about is in the habit of telling prospective writers to send him the only the first sentence of their novel, as he has the peculiar power to be able to tell the riff from the raff that quickly.  Had I but known.  Why did I both to write the other four hundred pages of the manuscript when a single sentence would have served?

So here’s another re-tread, this one on agents and writers…

So, here’s the thing;  I am stalking that rarest of game, the agent who actually believes in literary fiction and in my ability to write it (and sell it).

For some years now, it had been just Bob the Agent and me.  We laughed together, we cried together, and, once, a few years, ago, we went through an actual duel between two different publishers for one of my books.  I sat there in one publisher’s office with my sunglasses on, afraid that my eyes would give me away, as Bob nudged and noodled, trying to get the best deal.

How were we to know, like the husband and wife whose trip to Paris was their marriage’s highlight, that it would never be the same again.  When we ran out of the publishers’ and into a coffeehouse around the corner, each flushed from the meeting as much as from the running, sat down over lattes picked apart the two offers on the table.  We came to a conclusion, signed the deal and moved forward.  While the book that came out of that deal is still in print a decade later, and still selling, it was never the same again for me or for Bob the Agent.

Over the years, we grew apart.  He stayed true to himself and his attention to nonfiction books in the category of health and healing.  I strayed, I must admit, ever more longing for fiction, fiction, beautiful fiction.  Ever more wanting to not have to double check spellings and dates and come up with appendices to support the material in the book.

Bob the Agent is getting older now, doesn’t want to work very much, and who can blame him–so he’s pickier about what he takes on.  And I am pickier myself, wanting to limit my nonfiction work to few and far between.  So, while we remain good friends and a solid team, from time to time, our days as a hard-working team are now largely behind us.  Especially since, when it comes to fiction, I can’t help but think:  If not now, then when?

So now, in the middle of my life, I am out trying to get dates with agents. Sometimes I send them sweet query letters, filled with titles of books that they have sold or glowing accounts of their dedication to their authors and to the Art of Writing in general.  In those times, I am quite sure that my Paper Armada of queries will yield results.  And it does sometimes, some agents and I have dated briefly before we (they, usually) determine that we are not right for each other.

Sometimes I enter contests, quite sure that if my short story wins, it will carry with it an agent’s business card.  But not yet, my sweets, not yet.

Now I am planning other plans, as I become aware that one could spend the next fifty years honing a query letter until it is so sharp that it cuts, and still come away empty-handed.  (It doesn’t help that all too many agents now read–or, to me more honest–have their 23-year-old interns read incoming material just long enough to find an excuse not to work with it, which is sort of the opposite of the way it used to be, when readers read to find a reason why someone should pay attention to a particular piece of writing.)

Plan A right now is what I think of as the “Lana Turner Method.” Four younger readers, Lana Turner was once a movie goddess; she was known as the Sweater Girl, because she wore such tight sweaters and because she wore them so well. Legend has it that Lana was discovered in Schwab’s Drug Store in downtown Hollywood, where she was just sitting at the counter drinking a refreshing Pepsi. She looked so blonde lovely in her sweater set that an agent came right up to he and said, “Miss, have you ever considered being a movie star?”  She, as a matter of fact, had, and so they signed a contract and she soon was onscreen in full technicolor.  (If you haven’t seen her in Imitation of Life–well, what’s stopping you?)

So Plan A is this;  be not where the agents should be, which is in the office looking through all those query letters, but be where the agents actually are–which is a certain new book is to be believed, is in hotel rooms all over Manhattan coked out of their minds.  So let’s hope that that is not the case.  Instead, let’s hope that they are at nice dinner parties in the Connecticut Hills or the Hudson Valley, since the Hamptons are not what they used to be.  Let’s hope they are, as Bob the Agent was, stalking classes at places like the Open Center in Manhattan looking for new talent.  (It was there that Bob the Agent caught my act as I was teaching my heart out on the subject of holistic health.  After class, he called me and asked if I had ever thought of writing a book.  I had.)

So Plan A is to be where they are, where those dreamy, scrawny bespectacled agents are.  Since I don’t want to teach holistic health any more and don’t want to write nonfiction any longer, it may be harder to find their hunting ground. But my sweater is tight, my man-boobs are held high and I am on the prowl for that perfect literary other half.

May God have mercy on my soul.

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/falco__chemical_landscapes_digital_tales.html

In this E-lit work by Loss Pequeno Glazier, I wasn’t quite sure what it was that the story was saying.  For one, parts are in Spanish, very little of which I understand.  Also, with unfinished sentences changing constantly, you’re never quite sure if you clearly get the message.  It becomes a game trying to link the miss-matched sentences.

This demonstrates Calvino’s quality of multiplicity in that there are many different things happening on the screen in front of you.  It says so much, so fast that you don’t actually get the opportunity to read it.  You can try, but understanding it is another thing.]]> http://uffoodforthot.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/emblem-5/ Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:48:31 +0000 uffoodforthot http://uffoodforthot.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/emblem-5/ I believe that the human brain is a great emblem that represents the same qualities of multiplicity that Oni Buchanan’s work, “The Mandrake Vehicles” does. The human brain is made of on neurons that connect all aspects of the our human functions. Scientists say that human beings only use around 10% of their brain functions, so like Calvino’s examples, we are unable to connect everything that we want to. The brain’s neurons are like the letters that connect to create the message in the E-Lit work. The brain is complicated and tangling, similar to the description of multiplicity that Gadda gave, a tangled piece of yarn. Everything in the brain can be connected, and the combinations bring about new information. The multiplicity of the brain could be even more overwhelming the writing the “ultimate book”.

Author description: This is a work in Flash format. It contains three separate but related sections: the title prose poem, “Girls’ Day Out”; the author’s note on the poem; and “Shards,” a poem composed from phrases found in articles in the Houston Chronicle that covered the events that inspired the poem.

This is a very descriptive story through words but uses few photos. This is an understandable technique since the purpose of this piece is to commemorate the deaths of four girls/ women on land that the author had a connection to. Pictures of dead girls would probably not go over too well with the public. Instead, the author gives us bits from the police report which works equally well to convey the gruesome qualities of the murders. This allows for an imaginative visual process.

This work explores a poem that changes depending on the placement of the letters. It changes 5 times as more letters and words are added to the page. These words must be placed just so in order to tell the desired story. The author created the piece knowing precisely where words would appear, shift, and change in order to form the final poem. It follows Calvino’s “well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question.”
]]> http://ardentgator.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/lightness-e-lit/ Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:27:43 +0000 ardentgator http://ardentgator.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/lightness-e-lit/ Dan Waber’s Strings is an electronic literature work that features handwriting that pulls itself into various forms of ideas and shapes. The basic graphic line of handwriting is personified as it takes on human characteristics like laughter and flirting. This personification captures the lightness of a human psychological process and the weightlessness that comes with defiance of the laws of gravity.

The handwriting is not weighed down by the constraint of a specific shape or the weight of common haphazard use of words, but rather lightly transforms from simple lines to various ideas like “yes,” “no” and “maybe.” The handwriting is not weighed down by gravity, but rather dances around the screen, floating vertically and horizontally in random rhythm.

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/waber__strings/index.html

In this E-lit example, the reader can experience interactivity and read whichever story they want out of the mix.  It’s a simple background of stars; some with a blue-ish hue to indicate that you can click on them.  There is a voice at the beginning to spark your attention.  The stories are placed in the center of the screen where you can scroll down if necessary.

What makes this piece representative of quickness is the pace it’s actually viewed at.  There are a variety of stories but they’re all short.  It reminds me of Calvino discussing the folktales.  The stories are folktales.  They are simple and short.  Extreme detail is not needed.  The reader is less likely to lose interest because the stories are quick and have different plots, yet it all somehow connects to the mysterious voice’s life.

A bee hive is a whirlwind of Multiplicity. There can be up to 50,000 bees in a colony at the height of Summer. The great majority of these bees are doing the same things- they are worker bees. They pollinate flowers and come back to the hive to contribute to the honeycomb. A seemingly monotonous job, these bees are a perfect representation of Multiplicity because of their routine as well as the sheer number participants in the honey-making activity.



There is so much going on at one time around a bee hive. Because of the busy-ness and inability to follow only one thought at a time, the bee hive invokes a feeling of overwhelmedness, like in the E-Lit example, Nio.

Despite the seemingly chaotic atmosphere of a bee hive, there is a big picture in the making- a common goal or connection, even if it is hard to follow one part that is contributing to it. This particular form of Multiplicity varies only in that the core “thought” is more evident because of the visual aid that is watching the process. Without understanding through sight what is occurring, a bee hive would fall into the same group as Gadda’s literature and the E-Lit work, Nio. It would be unnecessarily overwhelming and the core idea would be lost in all the clutter.

Author description: The poem combines aspects of love, death, and nature in one piece.  Originally it consisted of three parts: text, photography, and sound.  In the Flash version these parts are arranged in a loop completed by a minimalist interface (to pause).

I have chosen Dawn to represent lightness for several specific reasons.

1. It is short and repetitive, unlike some e-lit workd that seem to never end.  The simplicity of a short text can create a feeling of lightness.

2. The background is composed of fading images of nature at dawn.  Nature in itself is light.  It does not contain the complexities of human thought.

3.  Despite the crackling sound which is anything but pleasant, it is looped creating a never-ending sound that could just as easily be only two seconds long.  We don’t know but at the same time it doesn’t matter.

With some philosophical content, the words can be heavy but I felt that this piece’s composition had the representation of simplicity.
]]> http://funtinue.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/emblem-5/ Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:28:58 +0000 caitybird http://funtinue.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/emblem-5/ An emblem that perfectly conveys the idea of multiplicity is the movie Inception.

emblem of Multiplicity

Specifically, the dream-within-a-dream sequences.  These are multiple levels of dreams happening at the same time, and Christopher Nolan’s vision that he shows us of the multiple levels happening is visually stunning.  It is cumulative in the sense that what happens to you in real life affects and becomes part of the other dream levels.  And again, visually the movie is stunning, and the audience has so much to look at.  Certainly too much to notice everything important the first time viewing it.  You notice new things and pay attention to different things with multiple viewings.  The story is told in layers, just like the E-Lit poem, “faith,” is revealed in layers and shows multiple levels happening.